26 sep

Russia, unlike the US, is ”very close” to an agreement on the resolution on Syria chemical weapons, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters on Thursday.
”Russia is very close, the US isn’t”, Lavrov said responding to a question about the progress on Syria resolution.
Lavrov also added that the resolution submitted to UN Security Council is largely in line with Geneva deal.

The five permanent members of the UN Security Council appear to have reached agreement on a resolution requiring Syria to dismantle its chemical weapons stockpiles, said unnamed UN diplomats.
The comments came a day after Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Gennady Gatilov, said negotiators had overcome a major hurdle and agreed that the resolution would include a reference to Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which allows for military and nonmilitary actions to promote peace and security.

A format of a high-level meeting on preparations for an international conference on Syria has been expanded but names of all the participants of the meeting will be announced later, the UN’s spokesperson Martin Nesirky said on Thursday.
“This is a high-level meeting. We said before it was going to be a trilateral meeting between Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, US State Secretary John Kerry, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Lakhdar Brahimi, Arab League Special Envoy to Syria. Now the format has been expanded and further details will be revealed later,” Nesirky said.
Earlier, he said that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon would hold the meeting on Friday.

Talking about Syria’s enemies, Assad said: “They are stressed. The failure they have ended in due to political and diplomatic confusion could prompt them to move in an unreasonable and hysterical way. For that, don’t find strange any diplomatic, political and security escalation, it will be unrealistic, it is not more than a bubble or media war in a bid to retake initiative.”
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Asked by the Lebanese writer whether it is a strategic loss for Syria to lose its chemical weapon, Assad said: “We had produced our chemical weapon, during the eighties of the last century, in a bid to deter Israel. However it is no more deterrent and today we have weapons that are more important and sophisticated through which we can paralyze Israel in seconds.”

According to the British newspaper, the study showed that the number of insurgents fighting against the Syrian army is estimated at about 100 thousand gunmen distributed to about a thousand armed band, who came from 83 countries, including all Arab countries except Djibouti.

Russia has enough evidence to assert that homemade sarin was used on August 21 in a chemical attack near Damascus, the same type but in higher concentration than in an Aleppo incident earlier this year, Russian FM Sergey Lavrov said.
“On the occasion of the incident in the vicinity of Aleppo on March 19, 2013 when the United Nations, under the pressure of some Security Council members, didn’t respond to the request of the Syrian government to send inspectors to investigate, Russia, at the request of the Syrian government, investigated that case, and this report, i.e. the results of this investigation are broadly available to the Security Council and publicly,” Lavrov said.
“The main conclusion is that the type of sarin used in that incident was homemade. We also have evidence to assert that the type of sarin used on August 21 was the same, only of higher concentration.”

Syria was, of course, tabled at today’s panel. The recent Russian initiative to put the Syrian chemical stockpile under international control is a clear diplomatic victory that helped avert a new military conflict. But it feels like a very brief, shaky truce. What must be done in order to beef it up?
I agree with you that there is still no safeguard against a military operation. We have fended the threat of a brute force solution for the time being and are working on consolidating our progress to turn this respite into a long-lasting peace to avert the danger once and for all. What is to be done next? We must carry on with the Lavrov-Kerry plan. Let’s be fair to our US partners. They agreed with many arguments that we made, although Washington continues to pressure the regime and support its opposition in Syria, to supply it with weapons.

TeleSUR: Mr. President, going back to Syria and the chemical weapons issue. What are the real guarantees provided by your government that the list you submitted on your chemical arsenal is truly representative of the weapons you possess? And what are the guarantees you provide to the UN investigators in order that they do their job, inspect the sites and put the chemical weapons under international control?President Assad: Our relationship on this issue will be with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Syria is not required to provide guarantees to the world or to the organization, it is required to deal with specific mechanisms or to abide by specific mechanisms stipulated in the chemical weapons convention. And as I said before, Syria is committed to all agreements it signs.
Syria has recently sent the required data to the OPCW. Shortly, OPCW’s experts will visit Syria to familiarize themselves with the status of these weapons. As a government, we do not have any serious obstacles. However, there is always the possibility that the terrorists will obstruct the work of the investigators in order to prevent them from reaching the identified sites, either because they have their own motives or because they are acting on instructions from the states that support and finance them. Either way, we expect that their objective is to blame the Syrian government for not cooperating with the investigators. But as far as we are concerned as a government, we have no problem with agreeing to the mechanisms provided by in this agreement.